63
PROCTOR | June 2015
Reality bites
The perils of remote control DIY
Having children brings many
changes to which people have
to adapt – there is a new feeding
routine, going to the shops involves
more luggage than you would
take on a six-month expedition to
Antarctica, and there is no longer
any money in your bank account.
These were things I more or less expected.
I did not expect, however, to lose control
of the television.
I should point out that my wife and I are not
the sort of parents who allow their kids to
watch TV all the time. They spend plenty of
time in the backyard engaging in important,
skill-developing play such as throwing Hot
Wheels cars into the pool and burying each
other in the sandpit. This all happens before
I get home, if I get my timing right, but it
means there is competition for the TV in the
early evening – and the kids always win.
That’s because the programs my wife and I
might want to watch, such as the news, are
saturated with the sorts of horrific stories that
news programmers are convinced we should
know about in great detail, and when the ad
break comes, it will inevitably be for a ‘current
affairs’ program about bad tenants who
swear a lot, or (depending on whose turn
it is) bad landlords who swear a lot. When
it comes to current affairs programming in
Australia, we haven’t exactly set the bar up
in the ‘Woodward and Bernstein bring down
Nixon’ heights; we are more in the ‘Benny Hill
chases people down the street’ range.
Since I do not want to have to explain to my
kids the actions of agents of evil such as ISIS,
North Korea and Eddie McGuire, the news
isn’t an option. So, unless I am particularly
interested in what is going on in Sarah & Duck
(a show about, now here’s a shock, a girl
named Sarah and a duck, with possibly the
worst theme song ever – the title is repeated
four times, slowly and non-rhythmically; fans of
Kanye West will no doubt find it eerily familiar),
I am not watching television at that point.
That leaves my TV viewing to take place
after 8pm, but it seems I am not missing
much. There would appear to have been a
law passed which says that all TV stations
must produce, and screen almost constantly,
‘reality’ shows involving the renovation of a
house, unit, bus shelter, etcetera – although
these shows are to reality what George Bush
is to Shakespeare. For a start, they are all
based on the premise that groups of people
with the collective IQ of toothpaste are
capable of completing beautiful renovations,
despite not having done any training (or
bothering with pesky things such as building
licences and fire certification laws).
I have dealt with a lot of tradesmen over the
years, and while I concede that few of them are
likely to be in consideration for the Nobel Prize
for physics, they are pretty switched on when
it comes to their work. Given that most people
on ‘reality’ renovation shows would struggle
to buckle up a tool belt, I cannot see them
managing to correctly fit plumbing, or lay tiles at
the correct angle. I can only conclude that after
filming on these shows stops for the day, real
builders come in and fix all the problems during
the night – sort of Santa Clauses in steel-
toed boots. In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting
that a new reality TV show is just around the
corner, probably called ‘Commando Builders’,
about the group of builders who fix reality
TV renovations at night, no doubt wearing
balaclavas and night-vision goggles.
The real danger of these shows, apart from
the fact that one of them makes The Big Bang
Theory start late, is that they can convince
gullible, stingy, unqualified people that doing
your own building work is easy – which is how
I came to replace the floorboards of our deck.
This needed doing because for a long time
our deck was protected only by a sunshade,
a non-waterproof structure that is pretty lousy
at keeping out the sun. Some of our deck had
deteriorated to the point where, in a purely
scientific molecular-composition sense, it
was no longer, technically, wood.
I assumed this task was simple enough that
even I – with all the carpentry skills of your
average Labrador – could complete it without
much difficulty. This turned out to be correct
as long as you take a fairly liberal view of the
term ‘much difficulty’. The first thing I learned
is that there is a reason carpenters shell out
on power tools, because hand-sawing wood
is right up there with jabbing yourself in the
eye with a hot stick, pleasantness-wise. Also,
carpenters wear kneepads for a reason. I
didn’t have any, so I now have the knees of
a 90-year-old nun who spent her life praying
in a granite-floored church attempting to
atone for the sins of Darth Vader.
Still, we do now have a fairly serviceable
deck, albeit with floorboards with all the
straight lines of a calabi-yau manifold (Hah!
Super-nerdy physics joke!) and the kids are
now too big to slide through the gaps. I have
learned my lesson, though, and I am taking
steps to ensure that I will not run the risk of
home DIY stuff again. I am going to leave
things to the professionals, hang up my
hammer and, most importantly, upgrade
to Foxtel IQ.
Suburban cowboy
Shane Budden is Queensland Law Society
advocacy and policy manager.
by Shane Budden
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